Red Dog

by Willem Anker

  I give them what they’re looking for, I paint the Caffres as the innocent children of nature that the enlightened gents want to see. The more I keep my trap shut, the more they nod in agreement, fill in my silences with what they want to hear. De Mist cannot understand that our people on the border can’t see the border, that it’s just a river, full of mud, dangerous, or sometimes a parched ditch. I tell him about Caffre politics, who’s quarrelling with whom, last I heard. I add on and leave out; what does it matter; what do I know? Lichtenstein takes minutes. Now and again I catch him looking at me as if he wanted to measure me up and sketch me like a felled giraffe. I smile at him and talk to his boss. I am friendly and unruffled. I push out my chest. I keep my cramping hands under the table. The German records everything. Sometimes I lose the thread of my argument, much more interested in the contours of the carving against the table legs. Whoever carved it can talk to wood as these people can’t talk to Caffres and farmers. De Mist wants to know whether I suffer any remorse over my past.

  So far I’ve got away with everything.

  You don’t feel guilty?

  Those who call me guilty, have to stone me. For their own survival.

  I do not understand, Mijnheer Buys.

  If I’m not guilty, they will reproach themselves unto their dying day.

  Reproach?

  Yes, because they never lived, merely farmed and prayed and paid. I am a free man, a noble savage. I sign my own name. I write my own fate. My seed I sow far and wide.

  Etcetera all afternoon long. Goddammit, you surely know, even this I don’t believe a word of, but oh, you should have been there. You should have seen what I could see: the way they bought every bun I baked, all this libertarian shit. I am modest and friendly and then, every now and again, I drop a little pearl, something straight from the boudoir of that dissolute marquis of whom old Kemp told me. How they hung onto my every word, how they couldn’t wait for me to shock them with my free spirit. The priceless way in which my audience choked on my choice buns.

  When we adjourn, I ask Zondagh who made his tables and chairs. He beckons to a slave and whispers something and the slave vanishes. He says we must wait a while, then he’ll introduce us to a man like no other. The slave returns with his hands full of guns. Then he leaves again and returns with two chairs and a bag full of locks and a leather bag full of tools that he unpacks on the table next to the polished guns. Only then do I see the man standing in the doorway. He is slender and bowed, his skin pale from working indoors. Zondagh introduces the man as Gildenhuys. An elderly woman leads the man into the room and shows him a chair to sit on. He inspects us all, smiles broadly, shakes his head, but doesn’t make a sound. His long fingers move in the air and the woman makes similar movements. The man nods.

  Gentlemen, I introduce you to our Gildenhuys, says Zondagh.

  Zondagh says Gildenhuys was born deaf and dumb. He developed his own language along with his sister. The two understand each other perfectly, but for the rest he is cut off from the world’s eternal chatter. No wonder he seems so friendly. Zondagh proceeds to display the man’s handiwork to us. The bolts and locks, the breech bolts, the woodcarving. The chisels and hammers, the saws, long and short, each made with the most exquisite care. Craftsmanship such as I have never seen. Zondagh prattles on about the man to whom he continually refers as Our Gildenhuys. Gildenhuys himself shows his handiwork with evident pride. He even performs a demonstration, there in the dining room, in which he engraves an aloe on a piece of yellowwood plank that Zondagh has brought in. Then we are led out to go and inspect his smithy. Elaborate metal carvings are suspended from the walls. I can see Gildenhuys has had to conduct this tour countless times. I realise why he does it with such readiness. Yes, he is Zondagh’s Gildenhuys, the farmer keeps him like a tame monkey to impress his guests with his tricks. But Gildenhuys himself is the main beneficiary of the situation. He can live in the midst of all this wealth on the richest farm in De Lange Cloof, while being free to practise his trade in peace. Apparently he taught himself, an inborn feeling for taste and quality. There is a meagre supply of patterns in circulation in these parts, and most of the shapes and ornaments are of his own creation. A careful and patient giftedness. He plays along with Zondagh’s show, because here he can do whatever his dumb heart desires, in his own time, without the pother of a pot that has to be kept boiling. Without being sized up out there every raging day and having to justify his existence to his neighbours.

  The show is concluded with Zondagh’s insisting that his Gildenhuys must show us a few words of his sign language. His sister’s callused fingers talk rapidly with her brother, this man with whom she shares a silent life. She tugs at the heavy dress dragging on the ground. She makes a short speech about her brother’s secret language. How he might be deaf and dumb, but knows no lethargy and boredom in his occluded world. He is indeed a weird fellow; the figurines he carves are all from another world, or on their way to an unforeseeable elsewhere. The gestures he thought up himself also entertain the audience. He makes a horse gallop with the two forefingers of his right hand on the flat of his left palm. But it is his word for Hottentot that makes De Mist roar with laughter: He presses two thumbnails against each other, as one squashes a tick, and then looks up for the expected reaction. Zondagh must have in the past instructed him to keep this gesture for last. Nothing makes the high-ups laugh like the recognition of their own misanthropy in the countenance of an innocent man.

  Gildenhuys with his soiled and supple fingers is left behind in the smithy with his sister when we adjourn for a cocktail of genever before the evening’s festivities. Augusta’s little legs are trembling under the silken dress. She says she must lie down, the sun is making her light-headed. I look at her and she looks away.

  I remember Kemp’s eruption so many years ago when he rattled off the names of God, how the listing and the shouting exorcised dark things within him. While piling hay around the houses with my children and the labourers so that they will flare up more readily later on, I mumble the Couga things, the Couga names I’m taking my leave of:

  Yellowwood, assegai wood, ironwood, candlewood, stinkwood, stink cat, wildcat, rooikat, rooibekkie, red rhebok, red bishop, red hare, red alder, white alder, white-eye, white stinkwood, white sugarbush, krantz sugarbush, broad-leaved sugarbush, ganna bush, bramble bush, yellow bush, taaibos, slangbos, salvia, sour grass, sweet water, water mongoose, rock pigeon, rock martin, house martin, hippopotamus, porcupine, pincushion, piet-my-vrou, chat, dassie, the distant snow, spring hare, spekboom, keurboom, waboom, wagtail, wild wormwood, wild olive, wild hemp, guinea fowl, genet, the gentle rain, turtledove, loerie, barn owl, butcherbird, sugarbird, spotted mousebird, pied starling, pied crow, black-backed jackal, maned jackal, ring-necked raven, ratel, these accursed people, baboon, bee-eater, honeyguide, heather, broom, breadfruit, bulrush, buchu, blue goshawk, blue wildebeest, here and there a bluebuck, grey-winged francolin, grey rhebok, steenbok, bokmakierie, kiewiet, kokkewiet, klipspringer, duiker, lammervanger, pig’s ear, monkey apple, mountain cypress, mountain reed, mountains, valleys, milkweed, mint, mitre aloe, bitter aloe, things that from afar look like flies, elephant, Cape lion, Cape pheasant, fish eagle, bateleur eagle, tea tree, leopard, sandstone, stoep-sitting, soil, stones and stones, my uncle Jacob, my brother, my bed, my table, my farm, Philip, my dear dead son Philip, zebra.

  Oh the abysm of lists, of a life abandoned.

  In what I take to be Zondagh’s bedroom, I am standing at the window gazing over the yard. Festivities have flared up. Flames from the muzzles of guns light up the farm at short intervals. The farmers started the shooting, but De Mist’s dragoons are quick to join in with their guns. The new year is upon us. Answering shots are heard from neighbouring farms. He is handy with his mouth. His hand is around my shaft with the knob on the inside of his cheek and then again all the way back to his tonsils. In between he keeps mumbling and I understand not a single word and press his head against me to silence him. I star
t throbbing; he tries to pull away; I spurt, filling his gob. He chokes.

  Now let me hear what you’ve been so busy scribbling about me.

  Lichtenstein translates his German into Dutch for me. I make suggestions: It’s not necessary to mention how fat Yese is. Does he have no manners? She’s a queen. Cross out. My rheumatism is nobody’s business. Cross out. He reads some more. More is crossed out. Another few suggestions. He adds and crosses out. When I’m satisfied, he has to read the German as well. I like the sounds: the hard edges and sharp contours tempered by the soft burr. There is a splodge of my seed on his frills. He doesn’t know about it.

  You don’t have to believe me, but this is how I helped write the paragraph that would be quoted and translated countless times; the most complete extant description of my appearance:

  Die Vorstellungen, die uns das sonst oft vergrössernde Gerücht von diesem seltsamen Menschen im Voraus gegeben, wurden bei seinem Eintritt vollkommen gerechtfertigt. Seine ungeheure Grösse (er misst fast sieben Fuss), der kräftige, schön proportioniert Bau seiner Glieder, die ruhige Haltung seines Körpers, der zuversichtliche Blick, die hohe Stirn, seine ganze Miene und eine gewisse Würde in seinen Bewegungen machten einen höchst angenehmen Gesamteindruck. So mag man sich die Heroen der Vorwelt denken, das lebendige Bild eines Hercules, ein Schrecken den Feinden, das Vertrauen der Seinigen. Was wir nach den Beschreibungen nicht in ihm zu finden erwartet, war eine gewisse Bescheidenheit und Zurückhaltung in seinen Reden, eine Milde und Freundlichkeit in Blick und Miene, die durchaus nicht ahnen liessen, dass der Mann so viele Jahre unter rohen Wilden gelebt, und die mehr noch, als seine Reden, das üble Vorurtheil, das wir gegen ihn mitgebracht hatten, hinwegnahmen. Er gab bereitwillig Auskunft über die Gegenstände, wegen welcher er befragt ward, vermied jedoch sorgfältig, über sich selbst und seine Verhältnisse zu den Kaffern zu sprechen. Dieses schlaue Ausweichen, oft begleitet von einem schalkhaften Lächeln, in welchem der ganze Ausdruck des innern Bewusstseins seiner Kraft lag, und in welchem deutlich zu lesen war, dass nicht die Furcht seine Zurückhaltung verursache, sondern als verschmähe ers, die leere Neugierde der Frager auf Kosten der Wahrheit oder seines persönlichen Rufs zu befriedigen, machte uns den Menschen noch interessanter und steigerte unsere Theilnahme vielleicht zu einem höhern Grad, als es die Erzählung seiner Schicksale gethan haben würde.

  You can say that again.

  When I went outside, I saw that the New Year’s festivities, which had started quite demurely, had in the natural course of things got out of hand. This suits me well; I am absorbed unseen into the pell-mell. I drink with the farmers and try to corner an all too nimble little slave girl against the stable wall. She’s quite game, but then plays hard to get. I let her get away; my Sturm und Drang is by now bobbing in the belly of the German.

  Elizabeth stands behind me, rubs my shoulders, peeks at what I’m reading in the Flatus Vocis. She bends over me, her stomach pressing against the back of my head. She pages back until she reaches the sketches of the unicorn. She says, Hey, it’s an eland with a single horn. I say No, that’s not what he wanted to draw. She asks what kind of a creature it is. I tell her about unicorns, the fables that travellers come to find here. And how, when they search hard enough, they find the lie that they yearn for.

  Why don’t they draw our place the way it looks?

  Oh, my wife’s mouth. See the corners curling up when she talks, the lips thrusting out slightly when she listens.

  What will they do if one day they come across their stories in the veldt? she asks.

  She doesn’t wait for an answer, runs into the house. I hear a banging and plaster falling and then she’s back with the rhebok horns that were still hanging in the passage this morning. She breaks the horns from the plank on which they’re mounted, brandishes one straight horn in front of her.

  Come, Coenraad, let’s give them a unicorn.

  We go and dig up the white foal that died last week. The grave isn’t deep, the soil is still loose. After a foot or so our spade strikes the carcase. It smells of putrefaction, the worms are already hard at work. We pull the foal’s neck out of the ground. Elizabeth sits down cross-legged at the side of the grave. She holds the head between her legs while I nail the rhebok horn between the foal’s wild and liquefying eyes. The younger offspring leave their packing and come and stand around us and prattle. Elizabeth says the diggers will see the nails. I send Piet to go and find a broken harness. He returns with a bridle in a cotted mass, the bit rusted to bits, the leather cracked and torn. We bridle the unicorn foal, push the bit into its mouth. We harness the fable and cover it up to be dug up and written up by travellers who dare to follow in our footsteps. I hug my wife next to the freshly despoiled grave. We laugh at our mischief. I hold her until she wriggles free to go and pack the last stuff. In the lap of her dress the stains that leaked out of the foal, like the dry blood of pomegranates.

  When the sun stops climbing and slowly starts sinking back to earth, my offspring become more and more excited about the move. Maria and Nombini grumble between themselves and avoid me as far as possible. The wagons are just about fully laden. The wagon tilts are tentered. Near Elizabeth’s house a duck is paddling another in a puddle. The one on top dunks the other one under the water and the fornication doesn’t stop even when the bottom one has drowned. I summon two of the labourers and tell them to round up the trek oxen so long. There’s no end to the duck. I sit down and watch the shebang.

  The next morning at Avontuur, the first morning of 1804, I have breakfast with the Zondaghs and De Mist at long tables carried out under the trees. Lichtenstein says he’s keeping busy at the Cape. He writes articles about the anatomy of ostriches and the epidemic of tummy-run in the Cape barracks. He tells me about the map of the Colony that’s he working on. He tells me about the voyages he’s planning, the uncharted regions to which he’s looking forward – trips across the eastern border and perhaps even northwards to the Bechuana. He tells me about ships in bottles. He’s not even a quarter of a century old, quite wise for his years, but blind to the disappointments awaiting him. He knows the plants and trees and game of the country as I know them. The handshaking ensues and Zondagh gives me a package of rusks and peaches to take along.

  For the women in your house, he jokes.

  I look at Adriana and she looks away. The commissioner-general passes wind when he mounts his horse, on his way further along De Lange Cloof; on his way to pit his freethinking ideals against the everlasting mountains where the echoing crags are mute.

  4

  Maria bangs a little trunk down on the table and grumbles back to the packing. Old letters that have not been thrown away. Would she have preserved them for all these years? I know nothing about this; I don’t hoard. A few from Christina from years ago. I open one, but before I can read a word, the handwriting makes me keck. I chuck the goddam trunk from the table, get up and trample the whole lot into the dirt. You, who most assuredly have never in your precious life shot a buck, you and your kind curse all that is a man. Just look at the bloodthirst, the callousness and the heedlessly escalating devastation, you say. You raise your sons like the daughters of governors. Listen to me: Rather look at the mothers. Every son with a gun or a spear or a prick in his hand has a mother. Every son sees his mother in that moment when everything blanches white with rage.

  A month or so ago I rode across to my uncle Jacob de Buys’ homestead on Diepe Cloof. I was getting ready to take my leave of the haunts of Ferreiras and their ilk. As a child nobody in the house talked about Uncle Jacob the jailbird. By the time he was released, my father was dead already. I met him once or twice, but he and Christina never had much to say to each other. With the Senekals, too, he didn’t mingle. While I was keeping myself scarce here in the Couga, I never saw him. My family had brought it home to me very clearly that my half-breeds and assorted women were not welcome on their doorsteps. Before decamping for ever, I wanted to smoke a pipe or two with my uncle.

  Aunt Catharina ope
ns the door, glances over my shoulder to see whether I’ve come on my own. One eye is full of the milk of blindness, but she can still see quite enough. She shows me to the kitchen where Uncle Jacob is sitting with his coffee. He is old, well over seventy, but he’s still sitting up straight and his beard still hangs full. When he sees the calabash of karrie I brought, he empties his coffee out over the half-door and holds out his mug.

  Goddam, child! That Caffre porridge has put marrow in your bones. Just look at you. I heard that you’d moved in hereabouts. Thought you might come and show your face.

  I’m here now, aren’t I?

  He drains the karrie, holds out his mug again.

  Pour for us. As I always say, only a Hotnot woman can make karrie. Katrien tries, but she’s too much of a Christian for this devil’s piss.

  While we’re sitting with her in the kitchen, Aunt Catharina prepares food. Uncle Jacob is complaining about the people who are all bundling up here on top of one another.

  A man can’t move any more, the lot cluster together so much, sometimes six families squatting on a single farm. A few years ago you had to ride an hour or more to see your neighbour, now you can’t sit on your pot in peace, or somebody bangs down your door.

  I agree and check to see whether his table is as full of termites as mine. I knock on the table top, the wood feels solid. Uncle Jacob drones on.

  The beasts of the field can no longer walk the old trodden ways. Nowadays the rabble shoot at anything that catches their eye. And all this fighting, all the veldt stinks of people. The animals are starting to walk other trails. The pathways are getting fewer and fewer. There isn’t room for us all.